“It's about using common sense and avoiding stigmatizing a specific nationality,” he said.

However police in the cantons of Geneva and Vaud take the opposite stance.

There, a suspect's nationality would only be kept secret if it could identify him.

“We wouldn't say that he's Chinese if he lives in a small village and he's the only Chinese person living there,” Pierre-Olivier Gaudard of Vaud police told the paper.

“It's also a question of transparency,” he added.

Zurich lawmakers adopted a further initiative on Wednesday to stop certain people being subjected to multiple police searches based on their appearance.

Officers must now give a receipt to anyone subjected to a stop-and-search.

The move was proposed by two politicians in July as a way to stop racial profiling.

“In this way, officers will not only need a valid reason to carry out a check, but it will prevent certain people being searched several times over a short period”, politician Ezgi Akyol told 20 Minutes at the time.

“That would complicate our work in the street and would even be counterproductive”, Martin Niederer, Vice President of the Zurich city police association, responded to the paper.

“If we find nothing during a first search, that doesn't mean that, during a later check, we wouldn't find something.”